Primarily meant to host studies of the drama of the English—and European—Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as the culture in which it is rooted, the « Theta » series aims to be a forum of exchange and debate. All approaches are welcome, but a special emphasis is placed on issues of staging, representation and techniques of performance.

In the third of a series of Round Tables on Tudor Theatre dedicated to different aspects of folly, participants addressed the associations and (af)filiations of pertinent characters, or aspects of the motif itself, in works ranging from medieval morality plays to the comedies of Ben Jonson.

The approach chosen for the second of three Round Tables on Tudor Theatre concerned with folly is founded, most fundamentally, on the recorded usages in the early modern period of the terms “folly” and “madness”, both of which could carry varying degrees of intensity and either anticipate or blur the distinctions established in modern English between them.

For this first of a three-part series of Round Tables on Tudor Theatre focused on the staging and function of folly in the medieval and early modern English theatre, participants studied the relations between folly, or madness, in different forms, and politics, also variously understood.

Contributors explore a wide variety of dramatic texts ranging chronologically from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, illustrating how the concept of ideology may be applied to several domains: politics, of course, but also religion and relations between the sexes.

The terms defining the thematic framework of this volume direct attention to the essential experience of theatrical illusion-making, as well as to the question of religious belief, which was central to the theatre of the Middle Ages and continued to figure well into the Renaissance in varying forms.